After celebrating Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras yesterday, Roman Catholic and other western-rite churches mark today, February 6, as Ash Wednesday, or the first day of Lent.
The Maronite Church, which is the largest of Lebanon’s 12 officially-recognized Christian churches, however, began its Lent two days prior. After feasting chiefly on meat on Sunday, Maronites observed Clean Monday with fasting and the imposition of ashes on their foreheads traditional among western Churches. Orthodox and other eastern Christians will not begin their Lent for another month.
With two different Easters and three different Lents, Christians in Lebanon this week have more than politics differentiating them from one another. But, unlike the political divisions between March 14 and opposition Christians, the question of when the liturgical season of Lent begins is not one that Lebanese worshipers have fretted about in centuries, nor is it one many are fretting about today. The season, rather, with its emphasis on repentance, brotherhood, self-denial and charity, has the potential to be one in which feuding Christian leaders begin mending their shattered ties.
Observing Lent
Lent, or “As-Sawm” in Arabic, is the period of 40 days (some churches count Sundays, others do not) before the Easter Feast. Traditionally, Lent is a period of fasting, prayer and penitence that culminates in Holy Week with the commemoration of Jesus Christ’s arrest, trial, crucifixion, burial and resurrection. The 40 days are symbolic of the time that Jesus spent in the desert when he was tested by the Devil. One worshiper, Nabil Shehadi, the vicar of All Saints Anglican Church in Beirut, said that Lent is a time for “reconsidering discipleship and examining life and obedience to God.”
The exact dates on which these events are commemorated, however, change each year, as they are all scheduled a fixed number of days before Easter, which clergy call a “movable feast” on account of the way it is calculated. Western Christians, including the Maronites, will celebrate Easter on March 23 this year, and eastern Christians will celebrate the feast on April 27. The western 2008 date is the second earliest possible date for Easter. The feast will not fall on the earliest date, March 22, until the year 2285.
Since the early Middle Ages, both eastern and western churches have followed the same method for determining when Easter falls. To keep the feast in the spring, on a Sunday and loosely affiliated with the Jewish Passover holiday, Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21. That means that Easter always falls between March 22 and April 25, though the current 13-day difference between the Gregorian calendar, followed by most western churches, and the Julian calendar, followed by most eastern churches, means that their Easter dates diverge more often than they coincide.
Despite their concurrence, the Great Lent of the Maronite Church is not the same as the Lent of the Roman Catholic Church, a fact that reflects the unique historical position of this community of Catholics in the East. The Church, which is western by virtue of its longstanding communion with Rome, is also eastern in that it uses an eastern rite and Syriac liturgy, in addition to observing a more or less orthodox Lent. Maronites, unlike Roman Catholics, do count the Sundays in Lent as part of the 40 days, which means that the liturgical season begins two days earlier and ends a full week earlier, marking off Holy Week as a separate liturgical period. Fasting, however, lasts through Holy Week to Easter, adding up to a total of eight weeks.
Lenten fasting among Lebanese Christians is also typically far more severe than what is practiced by their Western counterparts. For example, many Lebanese Christians fully abstain from eating, drinking or smoking from midnight until noon and avoid consumption of all animal products (though there are divergences over whether or not fish is proscribed during Lent, with Orthodox Christians generally taking the former view and Catholics the latter).
A time for penitence
After expounding on the virtues of fasting in his most recent Sunday sermon, Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir used his benediction to comment briefly on the country’s less spiritual ailment: its politics. The fierce rhetoric of the current situation, he said, is “what has brought us to our current woe, with all the state’s institutions crumbling beneath attacks.” Then, in an oblique reference to the campaign against the candidacy of Army Commander Michel Sleiman, he continued, “Some people also seek to demoralize the army, which – despite the hardship it has been confronted with – is still holding fast, as it knows that its message is to preserve the country and all of its component parts. We pray to the Lord to safeguard Lebanon as the country of responsible freedom, human values and national brotherhood.”
In the end, it is unlikely that this liturgical season will bring the nation’s Christians together where others have failed. But, as the Patriarch and other clerics have pointed out, the days of fasting are a time for soul searching. Just maybe a little introspection will occasion a modicum of Christian rapprochement this year.
In a region with so much religious diversity, the variety within the Christian community is often overlooked. The 12 major denominations in Lebanon have a rich history dating back some 2,000 years. Their diverse ways of observing Lent, both liturgically and personally, are a real but subtle reflection of their shared history, which has in Lebanon, more often than not, been filled with partnership and cooperation. With scheduled presidential elections once more approaching, on February 11 this time, the Christians and their leaders should keep in the forefront of their minds this history, looking for ways to bring “the flock,” so to speak, back together.